Perl 5 by Example

There are a large number of simple mistakes in the text of the book that may confuse the novice.

Author: David Medinets

Publisher: Que

Price: $39.99 (includes CD-ROM)

ISBN: 0-7897-0866-3

Reviewer: Sid Wentworth

Now that Perl 5 has become the de facto standard version of
Perl, publishers are getting their books to market as quickly as
possible. In the case of Perl 5 by Example, it
got there too quickly. Since I have C programming experience and
have dabbled with Perl, I was looking for a book that would get me
up to speed in a hurry, and learning by example seemed a good way
to go.

Perl 5 by Example divides the learning
of Perl into four sections: basic, intermediate, advanced and “Perl
and the Internet”. The CD included with the book contains the Perl
interpreter, all the examples from the book, the book itself, and
two other Que books on Perl in HTML format. Each chapter contains
review questions and exercises.

This approach is valid, but this book doesn't do a good job
of implementation. There are a large number of simple mistakes in
the text of the book that may confuse the novice. Examples of
errors include spaces in the code that don't match the displayed
results, the use, without explanation, of an arrow character to
indicate continuation of text and the use of an incorrect technical
word—“function” is used where “variable” is correct. There is also
the tendency to make poor typographical decisions that could also
confuse the novice, e.g., the use of different length hyphens to
mean the same thing within a particular chart or the use of italic
font in titles that make operator sequences like ||
appear as //.

Even though I was somewhat unhappy with the book itself, I
went on to take a look at the CD. It unfortunately suffers from the
same problems. For example, there are links to example files, but
the files are not located where the links point.

From my point of view, another drawback is that the book is
clearly written for a non-Unix person—maybe less that a non-Unix
person. For example, explaining the case sensitivity of variable
names seems strange—what language doesn't do this?

If the typographical shortcomings and general errors were
corrected, Perl 5 by Example would be worth
serious consideration—particularly if you were working with Perl
on a Microsoft-based platform. For a Linux (or Unix) user, I would
recommend looking for another book.

Sid Wentworth
lives in Uzbekistan, where he
divides his time between UUCP hacking and raising yaks.